Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and , pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and , which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels. Since the number of consonants in the world's languages is marginally greater than the number of consonant letters in any one alphabet, linguists have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique symbol to each attested consonant. In fact, the Latin alphabet, which is used to write English, has fewer consonant letters than English has consonant sounds, so digraphs like "ch", "sh", "th", and "zh" are used to extend the alphabet, and some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled "th" in "this" is a different consonant than the "th" sound in "thin". (In the IPA they are transcribed and , respectively.) Origin of the term The word consonant comes from Latin oblique stem cōnsonant-, from cōnsonāns (littera) "sounding-together (letter)", a calque of Greek σύμφωνον sýmphōnon (plural sýmphōna). Robert K. Barnhart, ed., Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, Previously published as The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, originally ©1988 The H.W. Wilson Company; Edinburgh, reprinted 2001: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd., p. 210. Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna "pronounced with" because they can only be pronounced with a vowel.Dionysius Thrax. τέχνη γραμματική (Art of Grammar), ς´ περὶ στοιχείου (6. On the Sound): :σύμφονα δὲ τὰ λοιπὰ ἑπτακαίδεκα· β γ δ ζ θ κ λ μ ν ξ π ρ σ τ φ χ ψ. σύμφοναι δὲ +λέγονται+, ὅτι αὐτὰ μὲν καθ᾽ ἑαυτὰ φωνὴν οὐκ ἔχει, συντασσόμενα δὲ μετὰ τῶν φωνηέντων φωνὴν ἀποτελεῖ. :The remaining seventeen are consonants: b, g, d, z, th, k, l, m, n, x, p, r, s, t, ph, ch, ps. They are called consonants because they do not have a sound on their own, but when arranged with vowels, they produce a sound. He divides them into two subcategories: hēmíphōna, semivowels (literally "half-pronounced"), which correspond to modern continuant consonants, not semivowels,Dionysius Thrax: :τούτων ἡμίφωνα μέν ἐστιν ὀκτώ· ζ ξ ψ λ μ ν ρ σ. ἡμίφωνα δὲ λέγεται, ὅτι παρ᾽ ὅσον ἧττον τῶν φωνηέντων εὔφωνα καθέστηκεν ἔν τε τοῖς μυγμοῖς καὶ σιγμοῖς. :Of these, eight are semivowels half-pronounced: z, x, ps, l, m, n, r, s. They are called semivowels because though a little weaker than the vowels, they are still harmonious well-sounding in their moaning and hissing. and áphōna, mute or silent consonants (literally "unvoiced"), which correspond to modern stops or plosives, not to modern unvoiced or voiceless consonants.Dionysius Thrax: :ἄφωνα δέ ἐστιν ἐννέα· β γ δ κ π τ θ φ χ. ἄφωνα δὲ λέγεται, ὅτι μᾶλλον τῶν ἄλλων ἐστὶν κακόφωνα, ὥσπερ ἄφωνον λέγομεν τὸν τραγωιδὸν τὸν κακόφωνον. :Nine are silent unpronounced: b, g, d, k, p, t, th, ph, ch. They are called silent, because they are discordant ill-sounding, just as we call the ill-sounding tragedy "silent". This description does not apply to some human languages, such as the Salishan languages, in which stop consonants sometimes occur without vowels (see Nuxálk), and the modern conception of consonant does not require cooccurrence with vowels. It is not a vowel and is not followed by any vowels. Consonant letters The word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. Consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y: The letter Y stands for the consonant in "yoke", and for the vowel in "myth", for example; W is almost always a consonant except in rare words (mostly loanwords from Welsh) like "crwth" "cwm". Consonants and vowels Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of a syllable: The most sonorous part of the syllable (that is, the part that's easiest to sing), called the syllabic peak or nucleus, is typically a vowel, while the less sonorous margins (called the onset and coda) are typically consonants. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC, where C stands for consonant and V stands for vowel. This can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of the world's languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut: there are syllabic consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the world's languages. One blurry area is in segments variously called semivowels, semiconsonants, or glides. On the one side, there are vowel-like segments which are not in themselves syllabic, but which form diphthongs as part of the syllable nucleus, as the i'' in English ''boil . On the other, there are approximants which behave like consonants in forming onsets, but are articulated very much like vowels, as the y'' in English ''yes . Some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel , so that the English word bit would phonemically be , beet would be , and yield would be phonemically . Similarly, foot would be , food would be , wood would be , and wooed would be . However, there is a (perhaps allophonic) difference in articulation between these segments, with the in yes and yield and the of wooed having more constriction and a more definite place of articulation than the in boil or bit or the of . The other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, that is, segments which are articulated as consonants but which occupy the nucleus of a syllable. This may be the case for words such as church in rhotic dialects of English, although phoneticians differ in whether they consider this to be a syllabic consonant, , or a rhotic vowel, : Some distinguish an approximant that corresponds to a vowel , for rural as or ; others see these as the a single phoneme, . Other languages utilize fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech and several languages in Congo and China, including Mandarin Chinese. In Mandarin, they are historically allophones of , and spelled that way in Pinyin. Ladefoged and Maddieson call these "fricative vowels" and say that "they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels." That is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels. Many Slavic languages allow the trill and the lateral as syllabic nuclei (see Words without vowels), and in languages like Nuxalk, it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is (it may be that not all syllables have nuclei), though if the concept of 'syllable' applies, there are syllabic consonants in words like 'seal fat'. Features of spoken consonants Each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features: * The manner of articulation is how air escapes from the vocal tract when the consonant or approximant (vowel like) sound is made. Manners include stops, fricatives and nasals. * The place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved. Places include bilabial (both lips), alveolar (tongue against the gum ridge), and velar (tongue against soft palate). Additionally, there may be a simultaneous narrowing at another place of articulation, such as palatalisation or pharyngealisation. * The phonation of a consonant is how the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation. When the vocal cords vibrate fully, the consonant is called voiced; when they do not vibrate at all, it's voiceless. * The voice onset time (VOT) indicates the timing of the phonation. Aspiration is a feature of VOT. * The airstream mechanism is how the air moving through the vocal tract is powered. Most languages have exclusively pulmonic egressive consonants, which use the lungs and diaphragm, but ejectives, clicks and implosives use different mechanisms. * The length is how long the obstruction of a consonant lasts. This feature is borderline distinctive in English, as in "wholly" vs. "holy" , but cases are limited to morpheme boundaries. Unrelated roots are differentiated in various languages such as Italian, Japanese and Finnish, with two length levels, "single" and "geminate". Estonian and some Sami languages have three phonemic lengths: short, geminate, and long geminate, although the distinction between the geminate and overlong geminate includes suprasegmental features. * The articulatory force is how much muscular energy is involved. This has been proposed many times, but no distinction relying exclusively on force has ever been demonstrated. All English consonants can be classified by a combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop consonant" . In this case the airstream mechanism is omitted. Some pairs of consonants like p::b, t::d are sometimes called fortis and lenis, but this is a phonological rather than phonetic distinction. Consonants are scheduled by their features in a number of IPA charts: Common spoken consonants The extinct Ubykh language had only 3 vowels but had 80 or 81 native consonantsGeorges Dumézil and Tevfik Esenç, 1975, Le verbe oubykh: études descriptives et comparatives. Adrien Maisonneuve: Paris.; the Taa language has 77 consonants.World Language Statistics and Facts The types of consonants used in various languages are by no means universal. For instance, nearly all Australian languages lack fricatives; a large percentage of the world's languages, for example Mandarin Chinese, lack voiced stops such as , , and . Most languages, however, do include one or more fricatives, with being the most common, and a liquid consonant or two, with the most common. The approximant is also widespread, and virtually all languages have one or more nasal consonants, though a very few, such as the Central dialect of Rotokas, lack even these. The most common consonants around the world are the three voiceless plosives , , and the two nasals , . However, even these common five are not universal. Several languages in the vicinity of the Sahara Desert, including Arabic, lack . Several languages of North America, such as Mohawk, lack both of the labials and . The Wichita language of Oklahoma and some West African languages such as Ijo lack the consonant on a phonemic level, but do use it as an allophone of another consonant (of in the case of Ijo, and of in Wichita). A few languages on Bougainville Island and around Puget Sound, such as Makah, lack both of the nasals and . The 'click language' Nǀu lacks ,Nǀu has a instead. Hawaiian is often said to lack a , but it actually has a consonant that varies between and . and colloquial Samoan lacks both alveolars, and .Samoan words written with the letters t'' and ''n are pronounced with and except in formal speech. However, Samoan does have an alveolar consonant, . Despite the 81 consonants of Ubykh, it lacks the plain velar in native words, as do the related Adyghe and Kabardian languages. But with a few striking exceptions, such as Xavante - which has no dorsal consonants whatsoever - nearly all other languages have at least one velar consonant: the few languages which do not have a simple usually have a consonant that is very similar.The Niʻihau–Kauaʻi dialect of Hawaiian is often said to have no , but as in other dialects of Hawaiian it has a consonant which varies between and , with before but at the beginnings of words, though they are often in free variation. For instance, an areal feature of the Pacific Northwest coast is that historical * has become palatalized in many languages, so that Saanich for example has and but no plain ;Ian Maddieson and Sandra Ferrari Disner, 1984, Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge University PressThe World Atlas of Language Structures Online: Absence of Common Consonants similarly, historical * in the Northwest Caucasian languages became palatalized to in Ubykh and in most Circassian dialects.Viacheslav A. Chirikba, 1996, Common West Caucasian: the reconstruction of its phonological system and parts of its lexicon and morphology, p. 192. Research School CNWS: Leiden. The most frequent consonant (that is, the one appearing most often in speech) in many languages is . Audio samples See also *Articulatory phonetics *List of consonants *List of phonetics topics *Words without vowels References External links *interactive manner and place of articulation References Ian Maddieson, Patterns of Sounds, Cambridge University Press, 1984. ISBN 0-521-26536-3 * als:Konsonant ar:صامت frp:Consona ast:Consonante bn:ব্যঞ্জনধ্বনি be:Зычны гук bo:གསལ་བྱེད། br:Kensonenn bg:Съгласна ca:Consonant cv:Хупă сасăсем cs:Souhláska cy:Cytsain da:Konsonant de:Konsonant el:Σύμφωνο es:Consonante eo:Konsonanto fa:هم‌خوان (آواشناسی) fr:Consonne fy:Konsonant gv:Corockle gd:Connrag gl:Consoante ko:닿소리 hi:व्यंजन वर्ण hr:Suglasnik io:Konsonanto id:Konsonan is:Samhljóð it:Consonante he:עיצור jv:Konsonan kn:ವ್ಯಂಜನ ka:თანხმოვანი kk:Дауыссыз дыбыстар kw:Kessonen sw:Konsonanti ht:Konsòn ku:Denganî lo:ພະຍັນຊະນະ la:Consonans lv:Līdzskanis ln:Molelisi lmo:Cunsunant hu:Mássalhangzó ml:വ്യഞ്ജനം mr:व्यंजन ms:Konsonan nl:Medeklinker ja:子音 no:Konsonant nn:Konsonant pl:Spółgłoska pt:Consoante ro:Consoană qu:Kunkawaki ru:Согласные simple:Consonant sk:Spoluhláska sl:Soglasnik sr:Сугласник sh:Konsonant fi:Konsonantti sv:Konsonant ta:மெய்யொலி th:พยัญชนะ uk:Приголосний звук vi:Phụ âm wa:Cossoune war:Mangarabay zh-yue:啞音 zh:辅音